Here's my scenario...

I'm running Solaris 9 on an x86 machine. There's a monstrously big file on here that I need to get onto another hard drive with WinXP loaded.

I've tried using a live linux cd to mount both drives. No dice with PCLinuxOS and Gnoppix. They'll mount the NTFS drive with no problem, but they get really confused by the Solaris partitioned disk.

I've tried sfdisk on those live cds to change the partition type from NTFS to FAT32 so Solaris could see it. No dice here either. Even though sfdisk and fdisk tell me that it's WIN95 FAT32, mount still calls it NTFS and Windows still calls itself NTFS. Solaris refuses to mount. With no switch ('mount /dev/dsk/c0d1p0...') it gives me a '/dev/dsk/c0d1p0 is not this fstype' error. If I *do* use a filetype switch ('mount -F pcfs /dev/dsk...') it tells me it's 'not a DOS filesystem'.

Short of setting up Samba/Sharity and installing the disks in separate networked machines, is there anything else I could try?

Thanks

You can't mount a NTFS partition on Solaris, even read-only, trying pcfs is useless, FAT and NTFS are totally different.
Can you clarify the "Linux being confused by the Solaris partitioned disk" ?
I never had trouble reading Solaris ufs partitions from Linux.

Right, that's why I had tried sfdisk to change it to FAT32...

'mount -t ufs /dev/hda2 /mnt/foo' (hda1 is the boot partition, hda2 is solaris) gives me the 'wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on hda2, or too many filesystems mounted' message.

Am I just doing this wrong?

1: sfdisk cannot change the ntfs partition to a fat32 one, it can only change the partition ID.
Pretending a partition content is a different one won't fool a filesystem driver ...


2: Try mounting with:
-o ro,ufstype=sunx86

and do not use hda2, find out in the system messages what are the slices names
(dmesg | grep solaris), use the device matching s0 and the other slices having ufs format.

Can't you just ftp the file to your XP machine? I use ftp to send files from my XP to my FreeBSD machine. Never did the other way around though, but that should work.